Secret History

By Paul Gray

DISPATCHES by Michael Herr Knopf; 260 pages; $8.95

A5 the raw material of public memory, the war in Viet Nam has been a bust.

This is not simply because the U.S. role in that conflict ended with a whimper; unreconstructed Southerners and the Irish have shown how immortal ballads rise from lost causes. But Viet Nam dragged on too bitterly and too long to be tucked comfortably into a corner of the mind. Between the memorable images of self-immolating monks and returning American P.O.W.s, there stretched a decade of contradictory violence and rhetoric that splintered the country. Trying to remember, much less grasp, that history now seems like reopening a scar.

Journalist Michael Herr, 37, writes about this war while admitting that "people don't even want to hear about it." Happily, he does not take the next step and insist that people damn well ought to hear about it for their own good. Nor does he justify his work by parading Santayana's maxim about the uses of history; instead, he deflates it: "Those who remember the past are condemned to repeat it too." He preaches no sermons, draws no morals, enters no ideological disputes. He simply suggests that some stories must be told--not because they will delight and instruct but because they happened.

Herr arrived in Viet Nam on a vague assignment from Esquire in the latter part of 1967. His working conditions were ideal--no real deadlines, the freedom to travel wherever military transport would take him--and his timing was fortuitous. His year in the country coincided with some of the war's fiercest struggles--Tet and the battle for Hue, the siege at Khe Sanh and the Viet Cong's May 1968 Saigon offensive. Although he regularly cursed his own bravado, Herr made a point of being wherever the action was hottest, convinced that the war's "secret history" must exist there: "Somewhere on the periphery of that total Viet Nam issue whose daily reports made the morning papers too heavy to bear, lost in the surreal contexts of television, there was a story that was as simple as it had always been, men hunting men. a hideous war and all kinds of victims."

Dispatches reprints the reports that Herr sent home from the war, eyewitness accounts of combat that are even more scarifying in retrospect than they seemed at the time. But Herr blends these pieces with meditations on Viet Nam that began in earnest when his look at the shooting was over. For Herr came to realize that Viet Nam was the most intense experience life was ever likely to offer him. Hating the idea of becoming a combat freak, a reporter who needed a war somewhere in order to function, he also recognized the pain that he and fellow correspondents felt when their tours were up: "A few extreme cases felt that the experience there had been a glorious one, while most of us felt that it had been merely wonderful. I think that Viet Nam was what we had instead of happy childhoods."

This sentiment is intolerable and Herr knows it. Yet his experience of the war forced him to tolerate it. How else to explain to himself why he had never been so appalled and enchanted, so miserable and ecstatic before? How else to reconcile his admiration for beleaguered U.S. enlisted men with his disgust at the barbarities some of them performed: "Brutality was just a word in my mouth before that. But disgust was only one color in the whole mandala, gentleness and pity were other colors, there wasn't a color left out." Every new experience unhinged old preconceptions: "I remembered the way a Phantom pilot had talked about how beautiful the surface-to-air missiles looked as they drifted up toward his plane to kill him."

Herr's taut, high-strung prose recaptures the events that ambushed him ("I went to cover the war," he admits, "and the war covered me"). His ironic accounts of official U.S. delusions and deceptions may anger ex-hawks, if any still exist; former doves will fume at his refusal to label American violence as war crimes. Such responses are as inadequate to Herr's book as they were to the war. Deep in the heart of all the years of debate was the conflict itself, beyond the grasp of logic. Herr dared to travel to that irrational place and to come back with the worst imaginable news: war thrives because enough men still love it. -- Paul Gray

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